


And so I hold tight, to any hands I see

by Beleriandings



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Abuse, Character Study, Gen, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning, I cry about Cassandra during the Briarwoods years every day, See notes for more specific warnings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-03
Updated: 2018-11-03
Packaged: 2019-08-17 06:50:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16511366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beleriandings/pseuds/Beleriandings
Summary: In dreams, one sometimes feels a sense of foreboding dread that comes from knowing, suddenly and clearly, what is to come. This feels similar, but Cassandra also knows, inexplicably, that this is no dream.





	And so I hold tight, to any hands I see

**Author's Note:**

> A little late for Halloween but have some Cassandra character study involving ghosts, because I figure there’s no way Whitestone Castle isn’t extremely haunted during those five years. Warnings for canon-typical abuse and manipulation, perhaps-slightly-more-than-canon-typical horror, discussion of corpses, and some violence. Basically everything you would expect given the inherent darkness of the situation. Also, the title is from the Emilie Autumn song [Gaslight](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6Nb162AWbQ), which feels like a Cassandra song to me in terms of both tone and lyrics :(

Cassandra is allowed to move around the castle. They made sure she knew that early on; she is never confined to her room. There are places that she is not allowed to go of course, but she is, on balance, allowed a lot more freedom than she had expected to ever have again. She’s grateful; she knows she would not last long if she were locked away.

(That would force her to unpick the tangle within her own head like a ball of knotted string, and she’s afraid of what she would find if she did.)

She’s grateful for small mercies, of the everyday sort. 

( _Trust_ , says Delilah, smiling benevolently at her, a hand stroking down Cassandra’s temple to touch her cheek. _You have been a good girl, haven’t you darling? I can trust you, I know it_.)

Sometimes, there are ghosts in the walls of Whitestone castle. Cassandra never sees them when she goes looking for them. They are not like the ghosts in the stories. They are not how she thought ghosts would be, at all.

She remembers having bad dreams as a child; not very often, then – and different from the ones she has now – but sometimes, when she stayed up past her bedtime telling ghost stories with Ludwig and the twins, she would have a nightmare. When she was very young, she had gone to her parents, tapping at the door until she was allowed to come in and fit herself in between them in their grand canopied bed, listening to the sounds of their breathing until the darkness ebbed away and she fell back to sleep. When she was older, she would read by candlelight, or explore the castle; that was how she had found several of the many secret passages she knew. Or if it was summer, she would go out onto the tower balcony and look down at the town of Whitestone and at the Parchwood rolling away across the slopes etched in silver by the moonlight, letting the soft breeze lift the shadow of the nightmare until it was forgotten.

She can’t do that now, though; or rather, she can still go to the library or explore the castle, or go up to the balcony and look down over the town. But it doesn’t have the same effect. Those places are all the settings for her nightmares now, after all. The hidden passage she had crept down to the dungeons to try to rescue Percival, that night that felt like a waking nightmare, worse than any she has ever had. The library, filled with books that her siblings’ hands have touched, that seem to look at her accusingly. Even the view of the town makes her heart twist with worry; there are the scars of earthworks in the ground, the Sun Tree a pinprick point in the town square. She can’t see the bodies of traitors and attempted runaways hanging there at this distance, but knowing they are there is enough.

When she goes down to the town now, it is to speak to people that will – if she succeeds – become the next set of corpses to hang from the branches. She has them convinced, she knows. She is good at this, as Delilah Briarwood has told her, a gentle hand on her arm and a soft voice in her ear. Cassandra’s presence will rally the underground forces conspiring against the new Lady and Lord of Whitestone around her, and then she will tear them apart, with only a soft word in the right ear. She holds their lives, and the balance of power over their little plans for rebellion, in the palm of her hand, and she will do her new family so, so proud. Delilah has told her as much, and Cassandra finds herself coming to believe it, little by little.

She is much more comfortable in the castle than she is in the town; here, she thinks, she belongs. She knows what the Briarwoods are, and she has made herself complicit in it. She has made herself one of them, and there is no returning from it now. She’s long ago learned to block off certain corridors of her mind, to avoid even looking down them. It’s better that way.

Yet sometimes, Cassandra still wanders the hallways. But not to banish the ghosts from her mind, anymore; no, now when she does it, she sees ghosts, out of the corners of her eyes. When she slips into the shadows – a habit she has developed, even when stealth isn’t necessary – and takes care not to step where she knows the floor creaks, and looks carefully around the corner of the corridor before going down it, they’ll be there in her peripheral vision. She can’t always fully see their faces, but she catches the echoes of them, their forms and their too-familiar voices, resounding in her heart and making it ache with a unique sort of pain.

She sees her parents the most, and not just in the elegant, full-length portrait of them that hangs in the entrance hall. They are there in all her memories, and having them not there is bound to leave traces, she reasons; she sees her father and mother talking softly on the landing halfway down the sweeping staircase. When she sees them there, they are dressed in the clothes they wore that final night, the night of the feast: her father wore a blue and gold brocade coat with the symbol of their house elegantly worked into the pattern, her mother a beautiful gown of crushed velvet in deep midnight purple, her hair bound up and set with a jeweled circlet that had belonged to some other Lady de Rolo, generations back. Cassandra remembers what they had looked like so clearly: she could not forget if she tried, and she _has_ tried, actually.

She also sees them in other places around the house; the Briarwoods have the master bedroom, of course, and she doesn’t dare sneak into it even when she knows they will not find out. But there’s a little sitting room that her parents loved in the east wing of the castle, where the sun falls in through the south-facing window and the breeze blows in from the garden in the courtyard below.

Neither the Briarwoods nor any of their people seem to use this room, as it’s rather small and they have many others to choose from. So Cassandra goes there sometimes.

She doesn’t know why she ducks her head in the first time, other than the fact that it is unlocked, but when she does she sees them there, just for a moment. They are sitting in the cushioned window seat, leaning against one another; her father’s arm is around her mother’s shoulders. The two of them look as though she has caught them mid-conversation, laughter on her mother’s lips, when Cassandra enters the room. Her eyes widen for a moment, then fill up with tears as the pain that is never far away catches in her heart like a fishhook. But when she blinks the tears away, her parents are gone, and it is just an empty room again.

Her siblings too; shades of them are everywhere, in every part of the castle. She sees Julius in the armchair by the fire – the velvet upholstery was slashed in the attack, but someone has mended it with tiny, near-invisible stitches – his long legs crossed stretched out nonchalantly on the table, hand gesturing to emphasise some point or other.

She sees Vesper, standing on the dark-varnished ladder in the library. Her sister is reaching up for a book, but as Cassandra catches sight of her she pauses, turning around and looking at her from above. Cassandra looks away before she meets her eyes, as she does with all of them.

When Cassandra sits down to dinner at the long table with Sylas and Delilah Briarwood, she sometimes sees Oliver and Whitney sitting on either side of the table beside her, with matching grins at some secret joke that only the two of them shared. The twins had always been eerily good at knowing what the other was thinking.

And she sees Ludwig, her closest brother and the one that was there the most when she was growing up. She sees him sitting at the desk where they used to have lessons together, his tongue clamped between his teeth as he frowns down at a book that isn’t there anymore. The sun had used to pour in through the window, motes dancing in the beams, but now the windows are heavily curtained. She remembers when she and Ludwig had fallen asleep against each other while doing Elvish translation exercises, or how they had fought over a bottle of ink and he had spilled it all over her, so she had knocked him off his chair and they had ended up fighting on the floor, both covered in ink, but laughing by the end of it. Their tutor had been so angry; they were supposed to be studying the old maps of the valley and learning how the quarry tunnels had advanced over the centuries, and which of their ancestors presided over the castle at the time. There was always so much to learn, but she and Ludwig would just as often make paper darts out of their spare notepaper and throw them from the windows of the room, darting back to their seats and stifling giggles when their despairing tutor returned to check their progress.

(She thinks about those paper darts sometimes, as she watched the snow hawks riding the mountain thermals above Whitestone against a leaden-grey sky. She thinks how fine a thing it would be to fly, to ride the thermals and go where no one knows who she was or what she has done, what she is still doing. To cast her name aside and find a new one, that doesn’t weigh so heavily on her shoulders. She doesn’t let herself think about such things for long, though; there is no sense dwelling on the impossible, and besides, sometimes she feels her name is all she has in the world to hold on to.)

She goes down to the lower levels too sometimes, stands just outside Percival’s old workshop. She has to check again, but so far, she’s never seen his ghost. She hopes that means he’s alive. Or at least, she thinks that she hopes that. The idea of Percival being alive, being free, does _give_ her hope – in as much as she can recognise the feeling at all, these days - but it also stirs a sour sort of jealousy in her. They fled together, hand in hand. It was just chance, the trajectory of arrows in the black of night, which of them fell and which of them lived to carry on running.

She tries not to think of Percival too much. It hurts, in a way distinct from the way thinking about her parents and her other siblings hurts. It hurts because every time her thoughts stray down that path, at the end of it she cannot come to any other conclusion than the obvious; if he did escape, he must have done so by leaving her behind, bleeding out on the rocky path.

This is why she stares at the door of his workshop with darting eyes, wanting to look away and yet not. Not knowing if seeing that particular shade would be better or worse. She thinks of him, sometimes, when she rescued him from the dungeons. He had been covered in blood and filth and things she didn’t want to name, weakened by days of torture, barely able to walk. But he had clasped her hands, letting her help him up and lead him out of the cell, all without saying a word.

 _Perhaps he couldn’t talk at all_ , she remembers thinking. _Maybe Ripley has done something to his mind too_. It had almost been worse than seeing the others slaughtered, seeing him kept like that. But she didn’t regret it then, and doesn’t now. His death down there would have been long and slow, every piece of information drawn from him until there was nothing of use left, and only then would he have been allowed to die. Anna Ripley is nothing if not an efficient user of resources: she had overheard Professor Anders say that once.

Percival seemed to know it then too; his eyes, when she had saved him, told her so. He was still wearing his glasses, now hopelessly twisted and the lenses starred with cracks, but behind them his eyes _burned_. He did not cry, though; the tear tracks in the grime and blood on his face made her think that he had no tears left to shed.

She knows better now, though, than to trust the look in a person’s eyes. Everything after that moment has taught her that.

She never stays long in the corridor outside her brother’s workshop. It is Ripley’s workshop now, and Cassandra wouldn’t want to meet her in the corridor by accident. Though she knows that Ripley will not harm her, has no interest in her at all most likely, there is something about her that frightens Cassandra more than almost anyone else in this place.

(And besides, she doesn’t always want to think about Percival. She knows that there is no good to it; he’s a loose end in her past, but one that must very definitely stay there. Worrying at an old wound only causes pain. She’s comforted, at least, by the knowledge that she will never see her brother again even if he is alive. If he is clever, he will stay far, far away from here. And if she knows one thing about him, it is that he was always the clever one amongst them.)

There are days when the ghosts that she does see are not so benign. Sometimes, she can’t sleep and she will wander the castle at night, and the dark makes them cruel. They look at her with accusatory eyes, black with betrayal. They will say, _why did you survive? Why did you get to live, when we died?_ They will point at her with fingers that quickly begin to decay, the flesh bloating, splitting and crawling with maggots as she watches.

She doesn’t know where they are buried; they were hung from the Sun Tree, and she saw their corpses swing in the breeze until their flesh turned grey and rotted and the ravens pecked out their eyes, but she doesn’t know what happened to them then. She thinks perhaps that there might not have been much left to bury, in the end.

(It’s telling that, sometimes, she thinks that’s for the best. After all, corpses that can hold themselves together with what little sinew and rotting flesh they have left don’t tend to stay in the ground long here.)

Tonight, she can’t sleep, so she wanders the castle. And tonight, it seems, is a night when the ghosts press particularly close to the living world, their presence felt in every ancient stone of the place.

Cassandra stands in a corridor that she knows well. There are chandeliers above her head, and they half disappear into the shadows shrouding the ceiling. The only light is from the high windows on the right of the passageway, slivers of cold moonlight coming through the gaps in the curtains.

Cassandra finds herself looking up, her head tilting back almost outside of her control. The dark looms above her, the chandeliers glimmering in the low light like crystalline frost.

There is something else hanging from the ceiling too, she realises. Indistinct shapes, materialising from the dark. Hung on ropes, between each of the chandeliers, in a line down the hallway.

In dreams, one sometimes feels a sense of foreboding dread that comes from knowing, suddenly and clearly, what is to come. This feels similar, but Cassandra also knows, inexplicably, that this is no dream. And sure enough, the shapes lower, and she sees what they are; bodies, seven of them all in a row. So close she can see their faces as they hang in the air in silent stillness, just a few feet above the ground.

She recognises the faces, of course, cast in white and pallid grey in the diffuse moonlight. The closest one is Whitney, her face recognisable as though she has only been dead for a little while. She looks the same as back then, and what shocks Cassandra most is that she herself is now almost exactly the same age as the twins; it’s been four years, after all. Whitney looks so young, and so does Oliver. Ludwig looks younger still, his mouth hung slightly open, his hair curling across his forehead and casting his still-rounded face in light and shadow.

There are Vesper and Julius beside them. Percival is not there. And there are her parents; Cassandra, on one level, knows this can’t be real then. Her mother had been beheaded, and placed on a spike instead of hanging by a rope after death with the others. Johanna had taken a sword down from the wall and tried to fight to protect her remaining children until Delilah Briarwood had caught her in place with a spell, and Sylas Briarwood had taken that fearful blade of his and struck off her head with one blow. Cassandra had seen it roll along the floor and come to rest as silence fell, seen the blood soaking into the soft blue carpet.

(Her father had not seen it, because he was dead already. Cassandra remembers, at the time, feeling grateful for this small mercy.)

So, logically, Cassandra knows that because her mother’s body had not been able to hang like this, it means that this is not real; just a vision, spun by spectres or perhaps by her own mind. But the realisation does not make the sight fade, or make it feel less real. The silence is unsettling, pressing in on her as Cassandra stands, paralysed as surely as though held by a spell herself, like a frightened deer before the face of a hunter.

Unable to save herself, unable to run. She has no idea how long she stands there; she half expects the corpses to move, to dance on the ends of their ropes, but somehow, the stillness is worse. She deserves to be hurt by them, she thinks. That at least would be a form of justice. Poetic and tragic, perhaps. This unending stillness, this silent condemnation without breath, this is worse.

(Yes, stasis is agony, but it seems that it is the particular agony she has been condemned to, it seems sometimes. After all, it’s how she lives everyday, this silence pressing in at her.)

“Darling? Whatever are you doing here, in the middle of the night?”

Cassandra flinches at the sound of the voice, the very reality of it jarring her out of her trance. She turns, hastily smoothing down her nightdress, pulling her robe a little closer about herself. She feels suddenly vulnerable, overfilled with sorrow, as though if she moves too far in one direction she might tip and spill out the pain in her heart. She is not sure that she doesn’t want to do just that.

As she expects, she sees Delilah standing there, an arm outstretched towards her. A concerned smile plays about her lips, tinged with just a little affectionate exasperation; and really it’s silly, comes the thought, for Cassandra to be creeping around the castle at night. There is no reason for such things, and no wonder Delilah has been concerned about her.

“Darling?” says Delilah again, stepping forward, slippered feet silent on the floor. She holds out the other hand too, offering both to Cassandra. “Did you have a bad dream?”

Cassandra’s throat closes, words sticking there. “No” she says, hating the tremble in her voice. “No, I am perfectly all right, thank you.”

Delilah frowns, placing her hand on Cassandra’s cheek, index finger against her temple. Cassandra feels a very soft warmth there for just a moment, her vision blurring for just a second as Delilah’s lips move, whispering a word. But a moment later, the sensation is gone from her memory, and there is only the two of them there in the corridor, Delilah’s touch gentle against her skin. Cassandra feels an errant tear roll down her face, and is momentarily embarrassed by it. She is so weak, she thinks. She has been lucky, all things considered.

“Oh, my dear” says Delilah, pulling Cassandra in close in a hug. “You know that there’s no need to hide. You can tell me anything that’s troubling you.” For a moment, Cassandra thinks of resisting, but her traitorous heart stops the impulse almost before it begins as her arms close around her. She’s not sure she _can_ resist; her body seems to move outside of her control, just for a moment. The satin robe Delilah wears is soft against Cassandra’s cheek, her tears soaking into it.

For a moment, Cassandra simply allows herself to be held; it feels like an indulgence, but some part of her craves touch, and softness. She knows what Delilah did; when Cassandra looks at her she sees her killing her family, sees the dark necrotic energy crackling from Delilah’s hands in her mind’s eye, sees blood vessels splitting and cancerous magic making mangled corpses thrash and spasm grotesquely. But that knowledge exists simultaneously with this other part of her, the part that longs for this. The part that longs to pretend, to forget and simply exist and to stop _hurting_.

(Cassandra has become very skilled, these past years, at holding two contradictory beliefs in her mind at the same time. Like any skill, it takes dedicated study and practice, but she has certainly had more than enough of that.)

Delilah draws back, holds Cassandra by the shoulders. Again, her vision blurs a little, and she feels tiredness wash over her. Suddenly, she blurts out. “I saw them again. They were here.”

“Oh, my sweet.” Delilah strokes her hair, pulling it back over Cassandra’s shoulder. She looks concerned, testing the temperature of Cassandra’s brow with the back of her hand, like a mother whose child has a fever. “Whatever you saw, it wasn’t real…you know that, don’t you? This corridor is empty, I promise you.”

Cassandra swallows, biting her lip because she doesn’t trust herself to speak.

“Turn around, and take a look if you don’t believe me” says Delilah, gently. “I promise you, there is no one here but you and me.”

Cassandra hesitates a little longer; she feels a very faint compulsion, a pressure in her mind. She wants to do it, but the fear has not fully loosed its grip on her body. For a moment, the two forces fight, and Cassandra feels momentarily like a paper doll in the wind, helpless as they battle for control. A moment later though, she turns, motion stilted and awkward, forcing herself to hold her head high and peer into the half-darkness.

There is nothing there but an empty corridor, the chandeliers glimmering a little as she moves her head.

Delilah stands beside her, her hand on the back of Cassandra’s neck, where the collar of her nightgown exposes a strip of bare skin. “See, dear?” she says, taking Cassandra’s hand in her other hand, giving it a gentle squeeze. “There’s nothing to be afraid of, after all.”


End file.
